uring an interview with Kal Penn on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” Joe Biden repeated a completely made up story about how an epiphany in high school led to his support for same sex marriage at a young age.
“I can remember exactly when my epiphany was. I hadn’t thought about it much, to tell you the truth. I was a senior in high school and my dad was dropping me off. I remember about to get out of the car, and I looked to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other,” Biden said. He claims he then turned to his father, who said, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.”
It’s extremely unlikely that anyone, even Biden, was thinking about gay marriage in the 1960s – a time when even the gay rights movement wasn’t advocating for it.
The timeline Biden gives for his personal evolution on the issue doesn’t add up – as decades after this reported high school epiphany, in 1996, Biden was among the 85 Senators that voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned the federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Biden didn’t publicly endorse same sex marriage for the first time until 2012.
Biden has told similar versions of this story in the past, in one variation saying that he was driving with his father as a high school junior, saw two men kissing in the next car while at a red light – sparking an “immediate” political transformation in the process that somehow didn’t materialize until roughly five decades later. Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
